Menu

Canadieu – What To Expect Now Canada Has Left NACLO

WINNIPEG – In a result that sent shockwaves throughout the linguistics olympiad community, Canada officially expressed their wish to leave NACLO early in December, with 52% voting to create a sovereign English OLCLO. The dust has since settled on this time-defining vote and we are now in a position to assess the impact Canadieu will have on the future of Canada’s involvement in the IOL as a whole.

What will change?

The first question on everyone’s minds is how this vote will change their lives. For Canadians, they have already sat the OLCLO paper on January 25th instead of the NACLO paper and, despite some instability in the stock markets beforehand, all has gone smoothly so far. When the first papers are released in a couple of months, it is expected that they’ll have “gone all Canadian up in that shit”. The main anticipated differences between the OLCLO paper and the NACLO one is that OLCLO will have at least one problem on pragmatic politeness and will have one question where participants are asked to “gush about how dreamy Justin Trudeau is”. When reached for comment, Trudeau said of the new olympiad:

“We like to say Ar-people-ian, not necessarily Ar-men-ian. It’s more inclusive.”

What will stay the same?

The US competition will still be known as NACLO, even though it is the only North American country to be taking part. This situation is not unique within the linguistics olympiad community – UKLO has been calling itself the United Kingdom Linguistics Olympiad since 2009 despite actively discriminating against students not from England, while the Spanish olympiad has brazenly called themselves OLE (Olimpiada Lingüística de Europa) despite the fact that, like, all the countries are European.

There is one thing we know for sure in this uncertain world: the Isle of Man won’t be making its own olympiad anytime soon.